The Avignon Quintet (65 page)

For a moment he hesitated timorously, and then, cursing himself for a coward, advanced with a deliberate
sang-froid
to reach the garden gate. “There you are!” cried Blanford cheerfully. “I wondered if the Prince had taken you off on a binge.” Felix recounted his journey home in the coach and Blanford chuckled. He said, “I suddenly decided not to go to bed; we got Max to drop us off and walked the quarter of a mile home – it’s not far, after all.” Felix opened the front door and entered the musty little villa. “I wondered if you would be walking tonight,” said Blanford; and suddenly Felix seemed to sense the loneliness and misgiving behind the words. “Is there anything wrong?” he asked unexpectedly and Blanford shook his head. “No, it’s just the end of this perfect holiday and one doesn’t want to waste the time on sleep. I went home dutifully with the others but couldn’t get to sleep, so I headed for town.”

Yes, there was something lame about this long explanation. Felix put a kettle to boil and prepared to make some coffee. Then the explanation of Blanford’s tone struck him forcibly and made everything clear. Livia had disappeared, and he had suddenly missed her and decided jealously to come and see if she were with Felix! It was true. Blanford could not help it – though he cursed himself roundly for butting in. He was propelled, as indeed Felix was, by a quite uncontrollable jealousy, which came and went in spasms, and which both struggled to surmount by reminding themselves that they should really be above such feelings. It was no good.

Thinking of all this, Felix poured out the dreadful Camp coffee which was made of liquid chicory and smiled acidly upon his friend as he said (unable to disguise the tone of quiet malice in his voice): “I suppose it’s Livia again?”

“Yes,” said Blanford surrendering reluctantly to the truth, “it’s Livia.”

Felix was suddenly furiously contemptuous of this spoilsport friend of his. His pent-up feelings broke loose. “And just suppose that she wanted to be alone with me, to walk with me?” Blanford nodded humbly and said: “I know. I thought of that, Felix. I am most awfully sorry. I just couldn’t resist coming here. I felt I had to find her. I am so sorry, I know you care for her too. But I have asked her to marry me later on.…” His voice trailed away into silence while his friend sat opposite trying to convey his disapproval and annoyance by small reproving gestures. As a matter of fact, at a deeper level than all this superficial annoyance, he felt a certain misgiving about Livia as a suitable person to marry. To love and if possible lie with – yes. “Marriage”, he said sharply, “is quite another affair.” Blanford detested the curate’s tone in which Felix uttered this sentiment. “Yes,” he said, becoming rather acid in his turn, “it happens to be my affair at the moment. That’s why I took the liberty of coming. But if my presence upsets you I can take myself off. You only have to say.” Felix was on the horns of a dilemma here; for if he were alone and sleepless later on he would welcome company; but if Livia was driven off by the presence of Aubrey … it would be far better if he went home now. Which solution was the better? He went into the bedroom to consult his little clock. The hour was pretty advanced now, and the likelihood of Livia coming rather remote. He returned to the disconsolate Blanford and said: “Were you thinking of a walk, then?”

Blanford shook his head and said: “Only as far as Riquiqui’s to see if I can pick up her trail. It’s a lovely night.” It was a lovely night! The words echoed in the skull of Felix as he apportioned the last of the coffee and decided that he would not go to bed, he would after all walk. Moreover he now sensed that behind Blanford’s tone of voice lurked an anxiety, a fear almost of the gloomy and ramshackle quarter of the town which he proposed to visit in search of the girl. He couldn’t resist a slight touch of malice in his own voice as he said: “I suppose you’d want to go to Riquiqui’s alone?” Blanford looked up at him and said, somewhat humbly, “On the contrary. I’d welcome company. You know that that whole section of the town scares me a bit – it’s so disreputable with its bordels and gipsies.”

This went some way towards mollifying Felix who betook himself to the bedroom where he changed out of his formal suit into something lighter, and topped it by his college blazer and a silk scarf. Through the half-open door he caught a glimpse of the glorified alcove which served as the so-called spare room where Livia sometimes lodged. The little cupboard stood there with its door ajar; he had already shown Blanford the male kit hanging up in there. He himself had never seen her in full disguise, though once or twice she had worn trousers to wander about the town. Blanford had made no comment – no comment whatsoever. What did he think? Felix could not say. For his part he found the whole question of marriage unreal – despite the magnetism of her beauty to which he was as much bound as Blanford. But there was something else which had qualified his passion. It was something he remembered with a certain shame – it was not in his nature to spy on people; yet, one evening, in a sudden fit of curiosity and without any conscious premeditation, he had walked into her room, opened the wardrobe and felt in the pockets of her brown cheap suit for all the world as if he knew that he would find something there – which indeed he did. It was a slip of paper torn from an exercise book – a love letter no less, but written in arch, lisping style, as if by an adolescent girl.

“Ma p’tite Livvie je t’aime,”
and so on in this vein, but riddled with misspellings and turns of phrase which suggested an uneducated and very youthful author. Felix examined the hand with the magnifying glass which was always on his desk, and decided that it was not the writing of a gipsy but of a schoolgirl. But his investigations went no further and after a moment of hesitation he replaced the note where he had found it and went whistling light-heartedly back to his office, glad in spite of himself that his rival was being betrayed. From time to time he frowned, however, and tried to banish the uncharitable and unfriendly feeling – for he was a good-hearted boy who believed in friendship like the rest of us. Yet it kept coming back. Sometimes, walking beside Blanford he repeated the words in his mind,
“Ma p’tite Livvie je t’aime”
, almost letting them come to the surface and find utterance. It was very vicious, this sort of behaviour, and he did not approve of it; but he could not help it.

They finished their coffee and Felix put the cups and saucers into the sink in his usual somewhat fussy way. Blanford waited for him, smoking thoughtfully with an air of profound preoccupation touched with sadness. A curious polarity of feelings had beset him – somewhere in the deepest part of himself he was actually glad that Livia was going, that they were to be separated for a time. It would take a weight off his mind, as the saying goes; he had indeed become a little impatient with himself, with the extent of his complete immersion in this unexpected infatuation for a girl who, more often than not, seemed hardly to know he was there, so remotely distant did she seem from all thought of him. The force of this attachment had somewhat exhausted him, and he knew for certain that it had prevented him from enjoying Provence as deeply as he might have done. Loving – was there some sort of limitation inherent in it? This was the first time he had ever asked himself the question plainly. But the answer eluded him.

“Avanti,”
said Felix, who out of boredom had started to study Italian; and together the two young men crossed the withered garden and advanced among the criss-cross of tenebrous streets and alleys which led them towards Les Balances, that desolate and ruined quarter sloping down towards the rustling Rhône. “I don’t suppose she really gives a damn about me,” said Blanford unexpectedly, throwing his cigarette onto the pavement and stamping it out with petulance. He was dying for Felix to contradict him, to come out with some reassuring remark, but Felix was not going to pander to his mood. “I suppose not,” he said composedly, looking into the deep velvety sky, smiling to himself. Blanford could have strangled him for his composure there and then. He made up his mind to find Livia if they had to walk all night; and when he found her to pick a quarrel with her, to try and make that dry little lizard of a girl cry. Then they would make it up and … here he lost himself in pleasant reveries. But what if she had returned home and was snug in his bed while they were wandering about like a couple of fools? It was amazing how his spirits soared optimistically at one thought and then sagged earthwards at its successor. Somewhere at the bottom end of this keyboard – among the bass notes – there lurked migraine and the ancient neurasthenia. They waited for him. He always carried a couple of loose aspirins in his pocket. He took one now, swallowing it easily.
Absit omen
. “It is not easy, I have never been in love before. And whores scare me a bit.”

Felix took on a man-of-the-world tone as he said: “O pouf! I regard them simply as a disagreeable necessity in a puritan age.”

“I once got clap after a bump supper,” said Blanford gloomily, “and it wasn’t at all gay. It took ages to get itself cured.”

Felix felt an unexpected wave of admiration for his friend; so he had suffered in some subterranean lavatory decorated by horrific posters depicting all the possible ravages of sexual intercourse indulged in without a rubber sheath? The man was a hero after all! “It must have been dreadful,” he said with a suddenly alerted wave of sympathy and Blanford nodded, not without pride. “It was, Felix.”

They had started downhill, sloping along a set of streets which straggled from the height of the Hotel de Ville to the actual medieval walls which alone prevented them from seeing the scurrying sweeps of the Rhône. A glimpse of Villeneuve on its great promontory – that was all; and a coffin-like darkness in whose soft shifting exhalations of mist prickled a star or two. Felix had brought a torch, but used it sparingly in the deserted streets. The noise of their footsteps sounded lonely and disembodied in the night. The municipal lighting hereabouts was haphazard and sporadic. The last two streets they crossed to reach Riquiqui were in dense darkness; the pavements had melted away, and occasional cobble-stones lay about ready to trip them up. The quarter was an undrained one and smelt accordingly. Riquiqui’s establishment stood at an angle in a
cul de sac
and its doors opened into the street. Bundles of old rubbish lay about – broken chairs, bits of marble, sheets of tin, lead pipes and refuse. It stood, the house, like the last remaining molar in a diseased jaw; on either side there was a weed-infested waste land with the remains of low walls. A window gave out into this gloom with a yellow and baleful light. But the hallway of the house seemed to be in darkness, to judge by the blind fanlight over the door.

There was no sign of the coach either – which Blanford had christened “The Prince’s Pumpkin” – but this could have been dismissed and sent away to the livery stables where its horses were lodged. Or perhaps they had gone to some other establishment of the same category – though there were not many in the town which enjoyed the reputation and indeed the official protection of Riquiqui, for she also lodged people and operated (if such a thing can be believed) as a foster mother to waifs and strays. But she nevertheless remained in a somewhat ambiguous position as one who kept a house of ill-fame and was a friend to the gipsies; they called her “angel maker” for the children confided to her care were unwanted ones and would soon – so the popular gossip went – be on their way to heaven to join the angels. The very fact of her existence was explained by her payment of bribes, in cash and in kind, which was at least plausible; for she was fairly openly frequented by minor officials and the lower echelons of the police force. The two young men trod the streets of this raffish quarter with a certain native circumspection, though Felix once or twice whistled under his breath as if to register confidence.

At least they stopped before the door of Riquiqui and Blanford advanced to tap upon it with timorous knuckles. It was not much in the way of a summons and it evoked neither light nor voices in response. They waited for a while in a downcast manner. Then Felix picked up a brick from the gutter and made a more reasonable attempt at a knock – he didn’t like making a noise in the street at this time of night. Supposing that nearby windows were thrown up and exasperated voices urged them to go to hell? They would scamper away like rabbits. But no windows were raised, no voices admonished them; worst of all there was no sound from behind the unyielding front door of the brothel. An exasperated Blanford tried a couple of kicks, but this was not much use either as he was wearing tennis-shoes. They waited and then knocked again, without the slightest result. The silence drained back into the darkness. The only movement was the stirring of large birds in the ragged storks’ nests on the battlements. Somewhere – not really so far, but sounding as if it were situated at the other end of the known world – the Jacquemart struck an hour, though they were not quite certain which hour. “Not a sound,” breathed poor Blanford with a sigh of despair. “There must be someone there.”

Reluctantly they started to move away when Felix had a brainwave; his torch played among the rubbish heaps which filled the abandoned ruin at one side of the brothel. There were some oil drums in the corner and they gave him an idea. He rolled one over the mossy surface and placed it against the wall under the lighted window, mounting it very slowly, with a thousand precautions; for he did not wish to fall among the foundations and break his back. At last he levelled off, and, holding onto the wall, craned his neck towards the light. “It’s a lavatory,” he said in a low voice. “They’ve left the light on and the door open.” Then he drew a deep breath and said: “Jesus! There they are! Just look at our old Prince!”

Blanford, consumed with curiosity, hurried to take possession of his own olive oil drum and was soon standing up against the wall beside Felix, gazing into the lavatory and, through it, into the relatively well-lighted hallway leading to an inner courtyard full of divans and potted plants of somewhat decayed aspect. And sure enough there was the Prince, spread out on a sofa, and perfectly at ease; while Quatrefages, clad only in a shirt and red socks, sat by his side sipping whisky and talking with the greatest animation. It took a moment or two to register the more piquant details of this scene which had all the air of taking place in some small theatre – it looked a bit unreal.